Archive for the ‘The blog’ Category

Hey folks! You won’t be able to see this for a while, but it’s so awesome I can’t not write this RIGHT NOW! So BRBcoffee has moved around quite a bit, and even changed names every now and again, but this is by far the best relocation to date! Guess from whence your magical computing device is currently furiously fetching packages at almost the speed of light! Go on, guess, I’ll wait.
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It’s my own server! Kinda. Did you guess right? Ok, ok, just let me explain. It’s not actually my own physical computer, that would be silly of me, my home server is only up about 80% of the time, and is vulnerable to all kinds of failures, never mind the fact that I break the software on it all the time. My computer/server is my tinkerbox, it’s where I’ve learned all the awesome computer stuff that I know, so there’s no way I’d let web traffic crash it. But if it’s not really my server, how can it be my server, you ask? Well, there’s this magical thing called cloud computing, and Amazon’s kind is the best.

Enter Amazon Web Services

You know, me and Amazon, we’re cool. These are the things I like about Amazon:

Okay, so it’s not a very balanced relationship, but hey,what can you do? Anyway, they’ve got this thing called Amazon Web Services, which I’ve known about for a while now, but never really started using, because even though I knew it wasn’t all that expensive, it just seemed like I didn’t have the needs that mandated cashing out for their services. Turns out they have a free tier that lasts for a whole year! And what’s this free tier like? Lots of ads, limited to no functionality, the usual shazam, right? Not at all! I have not seen a single ad thus far, and with the free tier, you can:

Run up to two micro Could Computing Instances (EC2)

Have up to 30GB of persistent Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Reserve one elastic ip (read: static ip), free for life!

Run all kinds of operating systems on your EC2 instances

Run the instances for 750 hours a month! (That’s 31 days, or all month long baby!)

Lots of other stuff I don’t even know what does yet!

So that’s what I’m doing now. The learning curve is kinda steep, took me about two days to figure out enough to get this stuff working, and a lot of trial and error. RIP all you failed EC2 instances, I’m sorry for my incompetence. Anyhoo, how about when the free trial ends, you ask? Well, I done crunched the numbers, and it comes out to like ten bucks or so, and that’s supposing I don’t come up with a clever caching method to keep stuff from being read from the permanent storage as much as possible.

Now, it’s not like I’d do all this just so I could have complete control over my website (I totally would, actually), oh no, there’s much more to it. See, what you see is this website. What I see is my own server pushing out my own content. Pretty sweet, but allow me to underline the important part there. What I see is my own server pushing out my own content. It’s basically a nice little box with ridiculous bandwidth and impossibly fast disk access running GNU/Linux, and I can do whatever I want with it. So what have I got it doing for me, besides serving up this website? Well, it’s a git server, for one. My source code is scattered around the web, because different projects called for different services. Now all I have to do is install a Linux package or two, and I’ve got the service I need, all coming out of one place, namely supercharged BRBcoffee.com. I know unauthorized people won’t be able to peek at my stuff, because people I don’t explicitly allow aren’t even able to reach the login screen. I’ll sure as hell be using it as a vpn when I’m on public wifi, the speed hit will hardly be noticeable. I’ll be serving all kinds of appdata from here when my apps start popping up in the Play Store. It’s everything and anything I want it to be, and that’s the beauty of it!

I think that’s enough gushing for one night, and I gotta get up soon. In the meantime, you go check out AWS, and start your free trial.

Oh, what am I talking about, you won’t even be able to read this until the DNS refreshes.

Song of the blog: You know, I didn’t even listen to music while I wrote this, but have my new favorite song anyway. 君に願いを

Thought you were rid of me, didntcha? Well, ha! Wrong! Also I am a wizard. All the data I had backed up was stored on my netbook, whose charger went to hades a while ago, so the outlook was, shall we say, grim. However, you know us techies, we don’t let a little thing like dead hardware stop us, so I cracked that thing open (thank you, Samsung, you certainly made it a challenge), got the harddisk out and wired it up to my macbook. Now, there’s some kind of connectivity issue to the screen on my macbook, so I haven’t been using it at all for months now, but apparently not doing shit will do wonders for that kind of thing, so now it works some of the time, if I don’t touch it at all, which makes it a bit difficult to use it.

Anyway, I got that working, patched up the sql data, wrestled with a restrictive hosting service, finally got my files extracted, did some more database patching to get all the options right, damn script provided by the host only updated half the records, so I was a bit puzzled when it was apparently unable to write anything to disk. It was trying to write to the old host, not the one we moved to last time and then disappeared without warning, no, that would make sense. It was trying to write to the host we used before that one, go figure. Oh, and it looks like all of y’alls magnificent comments have gone missing.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with tonight’s activities. It feels so good to be back! I think it’s time to give an old tradition another go, don’t you? I’m a bit nervous, to be honest, this one had better be good. So… I think I’m gonna do two of em this time, both by the same band.

Song of the blog: It’s Not Over, Secondhand Serenade
Other song of the blog: Half Alive, SecondhandSerenade

Sup dudes and ladydudes! Long time no chat! Guess what I’m doing? I’m hanging out at the NuMusic office! What’s NuMusic you ask? Why it’s this totally awesome festival we’re arranging in Stavanger this fall! Wait, allow me to put on my other hat… There we go! Hi there, I’m Bjørn, the office hermit, pleased to meet you 🙂

So, yeah, NuMusic! Why should you come to this festival, you ask? Because it’s totally awesome, of course! Why is it awesome? Because I work here, duh.

You want something more concrete, don’t you? Well, how about I tell you some of the bands that have been released? Yeah, that’d be cool. Are you ready for this? Alright, now please don’t squeal too loudly, you’ll wake the neighbors.

Ze list:

Datarock (remember what I said about squealing now)

Grandmaster Flash

Anti Pop Consortium

Mount Kimbie

Alright! But hold your horses, the ticket system isn’t up just yet. But we’re hard at work getting it ready for the masses! Just remember, you charge when I shout charge!

Hasta NuMusic siempre!

In other news, the server guys are giving me shit about cpu overusage, but I’m working with some guys to get it worked out. We’ll be up and flying again in no time! And there’s one little secret still in the works, which I don’t really want to spoil beforetime, seeing as it can still fall into pieces in my hands, but rest assured, it’s gonna be wicked.

What do I want you to walk away with having read this post?Never count the Burnie out, and get your gorgeous ass over to NuMusic.no!

Allow me to preface this entry with a lingual note: neither my vast knowledge of the english language, nor my vast knowledge of googling for translations, has given me an apt translation for the Norwegian word “valgkamp”. The best i can come up with is electoral campaign, being the period before elections where parties do stuff to get votes. Oh yeah.

So anyways. This weekend, I attended the electoral campaign conference of my political party, Red. Or The Red Party, as wikipedia calls us. Lots of interesting stuff happened, I want to focus on one thing: the new coffee mugs!

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Best. Mug. Ever!

Not only is it awesome in shape and whiteness, but the logo is just sexy as hell! The image is a little bit blurry, it looks even better on the actual mug. It makes every sip of coffee awesome.

Burnie posted this awesome blogpost, concerning one of the big questions for us revolutionaries. Revolution vs Parlamentarism? If you haven’t read it yet, mozy on over there. I’ll wait for you.

This got me thinking, and rather than writing this in a comment, I feel like putting it into a blog entry.

The revolutionary socialist parties that exist today are small. Well, obviously that differs, but despite how Karl Marx predicted that the socialist movement would be strongest in the countries where capitalism had evolved furtherst (I think it’s safe to say that Norway falls under this category), in the most advanced countries the marxist parties are so small as to barely count for anything. Obviously, Marx was no magician so he couldn’t predict shitdicks like Stalin and Pol Pot messing with his beautiful words, but that’s for another blog entry.

With that in mind, i return to the question I am trying to answer, which Burnie so neatly presented: why are political movements with the end goal of breaking capitalism and establishing a new, more demoractic system, bothering with parliamentary work on the premises of the very system we want changed?

No one can predict when a revolutionary situation arises. When the october-revolution in Russia 1917 started, Lenin was in Europe. He thought it would happen there, and did not think the revolution would come to his homeland anytime soon. Suddenly he got word that the proletariat was marching in the streets, throwing the Tsar! (really, really simplified version, but this is a blog entry not an article for a history-book)

The point of this nice little story, is that you can never predict when a revolutionary situation arises, it can happen quickly, out of the blue. If the socialist party is so small that no one notices it when the revolution comes, there is a chance that the bourgeoisie might stop the revolution, and cling on to their broken system. Or even worse, the revolution might go the other way, and send fascists and nazis into power (nazism is back in europe, another topic for another blog entry).

We do parliamentary elections in order to gain followers, activists and to make people know who we are. So that when the revolution comes, we are strong enough to pull it through and usher in an eara of peace, freedom and everything for free! (sounds better in Norwegian)

I was going to put something in about elections and remnants of parliamentarism after the revolution, but that is yet another topic for yet another entry. So conclusion: parliamentary work is important, as long as we don’t forget the revolutionary ideology by which we swear by. This happens to most parties, they get eaten by the system and forget about socialism. We fight on in our beautiful party because we believe that we will not.

Thanks for your time! Here is an awesome picture of a unicorn, to lessen the wall of text and because data shows that our readers love politics and unicorns: